Sunday, November 3, 2013

Saturday, Nov 9: Fiona Sze-Lorrain & Naomi Long Eagleson

Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, Chinese, and French. Her new collection of poetry, My Funeral Gondola, is published as a Mãnoa Books title by El Léon Literary Arts in 2013. Her debut poetry title, Water the Moon, appeared in 2010. In addition to her books of translation of contemporary Chinese poets from Zephyr Press and prose translations of Hai Zi (forthcoming from Tupelo), she has translated Romanian-born French poet Ghérasim Luca and American poet Mark Strand (Almost Invisible/Presque invisible, 2012). With Frank Stewart, she has co-edited Sky Lanterns: New Poetry from China, Formosa and Beyond (2012) and On Freedom: Spirit, Art and State (2013), both from the University of Hawai‘i Press. With Gao Xingjian, she co-authored Silhouette/Shadow (Contours, 2007). A co-founder of Cerise Press, and a contributing editor of Mãnoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, she is an editor at Vif Éditions in Paris, France. Also a zheng harpist, she has performed worldwide. www.fionasze.com

Naomi Long Eagleson was born in Korea and raised in the U.S. She is the author of Radiant Field, a chapbook published by Tinfish Press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English from the University of Hawai‘i, and was a Zora Neal Hurston fellow at the Naropa Summer Writing Program. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Arts & Letters, Words without Borders, and Tinfish Journal, and the anthologies Century of the Tiger: One Hundred Years of Korean Culture in America and most recently On Freedom: Spirit, Art, and State, both published by Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. She lives in Los Angeles where she works as a freelance book editor.

Upper Limit Los Angeles

About the Bureau

The Poetic Research Bureau is a valise fiction and portable literary service in Northeast Los Angeles.

Our living room at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown hosts an extended community of autodidacts and guessworkers caught up in language, inquiry and the unguarded arts. Just as it is: a community free school by day, and by night, a non-professional public forum for presentations, readings, screenings and sundry intellectual exchanges.

As an out-of-pocket California milk-crate boosterist enterprise, the PRB also serves as the irregular literary umbrella for projects such as occasional poetry journal The Germ ('97-'05), edited by Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card; and art-lit mag Area Sneaks, edited by Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi.

As a research bloc, the Bureau attempts to cultivate composition, publication and distribution strategies that enlarge the public domain. It favors appropriations, impersonations, 'compost' poetries, belated conversations, unprintable jokes and doodles, 'unoriginal' literature, historical thefts and pastiche. The publication emphasis is on ephemeral works, short-run magazines and folios, short-lived reprints and excerpts in print-on-demand formats, and the occasional literary fetish objects of stupidly incomparable price and value.

Several reading series are hosted at 951 CKR, and we welcome writers whose work lacks the 'commercial tendency' while harboring the bright, high-minded intentions that often lead to broad panic, righteous perversions, improbable arguments, and the ill-served cul-de-sacs of genius. The series are coordinated by the aforementioned Messrs Maxwell and Mosconi. If you're sympatico, passing through town, or need a megaphone, 50 seats and a big blank space, give us a write.